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Australian Postcards Please!
Sep 1st
We are hoping to connect with lots of different schools right across Australia for our topic work this term.
This will help our children to really understand what life is like today for their peers throughout Australia.
But for an old fashioned pen-pal style idea we welcome your postcards, because after all there is still something special about receiving mail – the physical kind!
If you are an Australian teacher or educator we would love to have you and your class send us a card. The postcard could be about your town, city or state or even a famous landmark you are close to.
We have two classes doing the Australia topic so if you could please send 2 cards one addressed to Mr Barrett’s Class and the other to Mrs Bartholomew’s Class.
John Davies Primary School
Barker Street,
Huthwaite,
Sutton-in-Ashfield,
Nottinghamshire,
England.
NG17 2LH
As we gather your cards we will photograph them and update your location on a Google Map. Don’t forget to add your class blog address if you have one – our Year 5/6 classes will be starting their own soon.
Please let us know if you can help and we look forward to seeing your cards in the post!
__
Pic: Wish You Were Here by H4NUM4N
Embedding Google Maps on Your Blog or Website
Aug 18th
This is a pretty straight forward process, but it also can have a variety of different outcomes depending on which map you want to display. It is useful to know these options to offer a richer visual experience on your blog or website.
Here is the basic run through:
- Navigate to the location on Google Maps that you want to embed elsewhere.
- Click on the LINK button above the map.
- You can take the second link of HTML to embed in your blog – this is the default size 450 by 350.
- Useful to note here that this is iframe code which doesn’t work well in Wordpress (or Edublogs for that matter) – so if you have a Wordpress blog write your blog post in the Visual editor and when you are ready switch to HTML editor, paste your code and then publish straight away. If you switch back to the Visual editor the code will get stripped out and your map will vanish.
Customise your map for embedding:
- Hitting the Customise and preview embedded map link will give you a bunch of options and allows you to refine exactly what you want embedded.
- The map sizes you can choose from are Small, Medium, Large and a Custom option for you to define the exact size.
You in fact have four different choices for the style of map you can use at this point.
Earth = Google Earth (plugin needed)
Ter = Terrain style
Sat = Satellite imagery
Map = Map
For a fifth and sixth option you can combine the Satellite or Earth imagery with the Maps labels, a little rollover on each button.
Here are the examples of the different maps that you can display embedded below, plus an extra bonus. I particularly like the Google Earth choice that provides that functionality to any user, they of course need the GE browser plugin which is available on Flock, IE, Firefox and Chrome.
GOOGLE EARTH
GOOGLE EARTH and MAP
TERRAIN
SATELLITE
MAP
SATELLITE and MAP
STREETVIEW
To embed Streetview just drag the little Orange pegman to the map and find your preferred Streetview, then just follow the process explained above, easy. You can always alter the view on the Customise page if you need to.
The location of these maps is the Angel of the North. It is worth looking out for these special locations where Streetview goes offroad and follows footpaths to get up close to various monuments or unique locations.
There you go, seven different types of maps to embed in your blog or website – I hope you found this little guide useful.
Whispering Change
Apr 5th
Is the sun beginning to set on a cumbersome educational landscape? One that is too rigid to quickly adjust to what leaners need and what they want from the future. A system that looks on as grass roots spread wider and wider beneath it.
I am in revolutionary mood as I return from some inspiring conversations with people at #BectaX.
Can those of us who recognise the need for change, rise above the cynicism? Rise above the barriers and the blocks. Let us be determined and positive, and make change happen in small ways, where we are, where we can.
Perhaps it is wrong of us to ever have believed this change will occur from policy. I am sure you are like me in that you have never waited for policy to define your practice. Each of us has a certain amount of influence, an ability to change 1 or 5, 30 or even 500 students’ experiences of school. If we believe it should be done, we need to make it happen in every small way we can.
I have stood in a room with hundreds of people whispering. It is very loud.
If we all make a small contribution, a small effort of change – if we all whisper, our voices will be heard. Here are some whispers:
- Talk to your students, to your classes about technology. Find out how they use it at home and what they enjoy. Plan to do it again soon.
- Take what you find out (formally or informally) to someone else in your institute. Better still get your students to explain it.
- Show someone how you use Twitter or other online tools to connect with teachers. Do it as often as you can.
- Write a blog post about your ideas. (Or even start a blog for your ideas!) Share your experiences, frustrations, successes and hopes for your work.
- Share an interesting blog post you have seen with someone who may never see it.
- Ask on your blog or on Twitter for other schools to connect with. Share the process with your class and give them an insight into what is happening at schools in other countries.
- Help someone on Twitter by retweeting a request for assistance. You never know where that ripple will stop.
- Let your children or students teach you how to use something.
- Find ways to help parents better understand what you do in school and how their children are using technology.
- Find out what your students think of blocking websites. What do they think is “safe” internet use.
- Consider managing your own internet filtering. At least have the conversation.
- Ask your local authority to unblock useful websites. Keep asking.
Whatever form your whisper takes, raise your voices. We are louder together.
IMG_9566.JPG by fabola - Attr-NonCom-NoDerivs Lic
Seeing Ripples
Mar 21st
When you share your classroom experiences and ideas, one thing you hope for is that they are transferable to other classrooms. This week I was delighted to see three examples of my ideas being successfully applied elsewhere.
The first is from Peter Richardson a primary school teacher in Preston who took my idea for using Voicethread for peer assessment of writing and used it for work in their Egyptian work. Here is the Voicethread he shared.
Kevin McLaughlin is a Year 4 teacher in Leicester and after reading my blog post about using Twitter and Google Forms for a data handling lesson, has applied the same ideas himself. His class compared music tastes from Kevin’s Twitter network (via a Google Form) with their own. I am pleased it worked well for his Year 4 class too, as Kevin explains,
The data that we now have will be used next week in further Maths lessons and the children added that they will continue to use the survey over the weekend at home and with friends. Real data from real people. This is what makes this type of investigation so very useful and brings an added dimension to data collection activities.
The final ripple I caused comes from Jan Webb another Year 4 teacher in Cheshire. Jan took up the challenge of using my Maths Maps idea with her class and developed a series of activities in a Google Map of Berlin for her class to use.
View Berlin in a larger map
Jan explains on her blog how they enjoyed using the resource in her class.
…a great deal of discussion arose from finding the shapes in some of the buildings and finding how many rectangles we could see in a building! We all really enjoyed these tasks and they not only let us discuss aspects of shape, but also provoked discussions about aspects of life in Germany.
These ripples are very encouraging as you are able to clearly see the effect sharing your own practice has on other teachers and subsequently other children’s learning.
If you have always thought about starting a blog but never got round to it, why not give it a go. The more pebbles in the pond causing ripples the better.
SSAT Primary National Conference – Connected Classrooms
Jan 28th
Today I attended the 4th Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Primary National Conference. I was invited to run some seminars for the delegates. Situated in one of the conference suites of the Emirates stadium, the home of Arsenal football club, the event accommodation was spacious and well equipped.
I ran my hour long session twice during the day, it was titled ”Connected Classrooms“. I based my practical ideas on 4 different connections.
- Student – Student (same class)
- Students – Students (different classes, countries, cultures)
- Teacher – Student – Learning (connecting with our curriculum)
- Teacher – Teacher (using Twitter for CPD)
I tried to keep my presentation simple and coherent, with a clear message about the ways we can use technology to engage learners.
We used the Nintendo Wii and I spent some time playing Endless Ocean and talking about the ways we have used it in our recent topic. I highlighted classroom blogging as a simple means to establish meaningful connections with other classes around the world.
Drawing upon my experiences of Twitter I spoke about why it is the most important CPD I have had. The most important connection we need to facilitate is between students in our own classes. I went into detail about how Voicethread can do this, the ways we have used it in a recent sequence of writing work and why it is one of my classroom cornerstones.
I think technology has the potential to both perpetuate traditional notions of classwork and to in fact smudge the definitions of what independent work means.
If you were one of those attending the sessions, thankyou for joining me and please feel free to leave me a comment about your reactions. I really value your feedback.
#classblogs
Jan 24th
Recently I have written a number of posts about class blogging and have begun using one again in our classroom. One of the things that I wrote about in my previous post is how useful it is to keep tabs on your visitor numbers and locations, and how children get very excited about this.
One big influence on this is a separate network that allows you to promote your class blog and drive traffic to it. I am aware that with a larger Twitter network you can drive a larger amount of clicks. I am going to put mine to good use and post on Twitter a class blog recommendation every single day.
I hope that this helps drives traffic to your class blogs, widens your audience and continues to spark curiosity about different visitor locations. But perhaps more importantly it might help you and your class make some meaningful connections with other classes around the world.
I have started the #classblogs hashtag to keep track of everything to do with … class blogs!
Here are the first 4 recommendations taken from various tweets and recent comments on blog posts.
- Mereside Primary School -Year 6 – Blackpool, England – http://meresideblog.wordpress.com
- Class 4OQs Blog - Year 4 - Birmingham, England – http://class40q.wordpress.com
- The Braman Bunch - Grade 5 – Michigan, USA – http://mrbraman.edublogs.org
- IST Grade 2 – Grade 2 – Tanzania – http://istgrade2.wordpress.com
If you haven’t already please drop by and leave them a comment, remember if they have a visitor map even if you just take a look you will add a little dot. That dot may lead to a question from one of the class…
If you have a class blog and want me to help spread the word about what you are doing I am taking examples from the existing comments on my previous post, otherwise just let me know the details.
Class Blogging – Joining Up the Dots
Jan 23rd
When I first began my own blog nearly four years ago I also had set up a class site too. We had a year of great fun and connections. The experience made me realise how easy it is for classrooms to have a global dimension through the power of this technology. No doubt many of you with class blogs experienced this realisation too.
I have had a fantastic week returning to classroom blogging and starting our new class blog >> Priestsic5. Before Christmas I wrote a post asking for teachers to share their experiences with class blogs. To explain what platform they were using and to share some reasons behind it’s use. As you can see from the link I have decided to use Blogger as our platform.
Why Blogger?
The two main reasons are ease of use and sustainability, and I think that the former directly effects the latter. I want the blog to be a well established feature of the classroom and for it to be sustained into the future. Blogger is extremely easy to setup especially if you have some blogging experience of your own – but even if you have not.
One big plus is the associated services and tools that can be utilised alongside your Blogger (Google) account. The most important is perhaps image hosting in the form of Picasa Web Albums. Used alongside the desktop Picasa 3 application it is a good solution. Amongst other things I can blog directly from Picasa, synchronise local image folders to the web automatically and upload photo videos directly to YouTube.
Synchronise
Just to unpick the image folder synchronisation a little further – on our blog I have created an Art Gallery slideshow in the sidebar. I want this to be a collection of all that the class create and so I will be regularly updating the set of images. Currently all I have to do to add another image to this slideshow is add it to a local folder on my class computer – that’s it. I think this is a really useful feature as we are often managing lots of images from a whole class set of work. Using the Art Gallery example here’s how to do it:
- Upload you images to your computer, Picasa should automatically pick these up and display them for upload.
- Create an Art Gallery folder for the images (usually done during upload process)
- In Picasa next to the folder, on the right hand side of the screen, click the Sync to Web button.
- Sign in to your Google account.
- Your images will be uploaded to a web album.
- Click on the newly created online album – click on “Link to this Album” in the right sidebar.
- Select “Embed Slideshow” and copy the code.
- Paste this code in your blog. For ours I used “Add Gadget” (HTML/Javascript type) from the Layout settings.
- Save and refresh your blog to check it is working OK – you can manually change the size in the code.
- Now every time you add an image to the original local folder (on your computer) it will automatically update to the web and consequently update your slideshow too.
In the remainder of the post I will be explaining a few additions and changes I have made to our class blog that I consider to be important.
Next Blog Link
One of the features of a blog with Blogger is the top navigation bar that appears. This has a “Next Blog” link button which takes you to a random blog. Naturally this is not ideal for a class blog as you have no control over what you are linking to.
The first thing I did was find out how to remove it. It is a pretty simple case of adding a small piece of CSS code to the Template code. I found this site’s explanation exactly what I needed. Here is a short screencast from the same website illustrating the process:
Remove Blogger Navbar – More free videos are here
How Many Visitors?
By simply tracking the number of visitors you are able to illustrate to your class that we have an audience. There are people out their in the world reading what we post. These numbers are important in helping you establish rules for writing posts and comments. Children have a better appreciation that their work is going to be viewed by more than just “us”. A visible visitor counter like StatCounter provides some useful analytics for your blog that you could use in maths further down the line
Dots on a Map
In my experience one of the greatest ways to hook your class into the use of the class blog is to display a map of your visitors. In the past and in the last week I have found this to be a great focal point for the class when they are looking at the blog. I have used ClustrMaps for years on my own blog and with classblogs.
There is something so powerful and yet so simple and wonderful in allowing your class to realise that those little dots are people who have just visited your blog and read about work you do in your classroom. They begin to realise the connections we can make and begin to develop an awareness of things beyond their own community.
I know it is only a little map, but it really is a powerful aspect of class blogs and I would strongly recommend you display something too. Can you think of any other way that your class would willingly look at a world map every day and ask questions about where places are? Have your class blog displayed when the children come in first thing and leave room for their geographical curiosity to shine through. What you do with that natural curiosity afterwards is up to you!
EDUtalk at BETT 2010
Jan 11th
I am delighted to welcome John Johnston, an Education ICT Development Officer in North Lanarkshire, Scotland for a guest post. John first inspired me to start blogging and has continued to do so ever since then. It is a great pleasure to have him as a guest explaining about another of his innovative projects: EDUtalk.
I’ve just found out that I am not going to make it to BETT this year, chief among the many disappointments is that I am not going to get face to face time with many of the folk I know through blogs and twitter and that I will not get the chance to do some recording and evangelising for EDUtalk.cc.
Fortunately Tom has given me the chance to rectify this and fulfil both of these ambitions at once in another way. If through this blog post I can persuade some BETT attendees to produce some audio for EDUtalk I will have evangelised EDUtalk. Listening to reports, reflections, conversations and interviews will add an extra dimension to the blog posts and tweets I will no doubt read in the near future.
What is EDutalk?
Edutalk builds on a project at the Scottish Learning Festival 09 SLFtalk. SLFtalk collected short pieces of audio from a wide range of educators at the SLF and published them on SLFtalk. The audio was recoded on a range of devices, mostly mobile, and posted through a variety of services.
EDUtalk was started to continue to give educators an opportunity to create or listen to podcasts created on the hoof. We, David Noble and myself, see this as ‘guerrilla podcasting’ an alternative to heavier more complex and official channels. In 2010 we are running a EDUtalk365 project in the hope of getting one podcast for every day published on EDUtalk, BETT hopefully gives us an opportunity to keep up the pace.
At the end of 2009 we ran TeachMeet Mobile, a new format of TeachMeet, where contributors produced live audio which became episodes of EDUtalk365.
How to EDutalk
- Pick up the phone: Use Gabcast. We have a gabcast channel whose content is automatically sent to EDUtalk, see the Gabcast instructions.. All you do is phone up and talk, gabcast and EDUtalk do the rest.
- Tag it: Use AudioBoo or ipadio and tag your content edutalk. The podcasts will be automatically posted to EDUtalk.
- Email it: Email any audio to post@EDUtalk.posterous.com. Record on an mp3 player, your computer or phone. Email it as an attachment and it will be published.
Full instructions for publishing audio by these and other methods can be found on EDUtalk.
After you send in your recording it is put in the moderation queue for EDUtalk, not so that we can censor or edit it, just to avoid publishing the inevitable spam. If you are recording someone else make sure they have given permission to publish (you should be able to make this clear in the audio). All audio published on the site is published under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License. At SLF we manage to keep the delay in publishing to a minimum and plan to do the same during BETT.
Why EDUtalk?
Podcasting is a powerful medium. David and I believe that hearing someone speak adds an extra dimension. Although podcasting can be criticised as slower than reading and harder to link from it has the advantage of adding emotional emphasis, portability and you can listen while doing something else. Try reading a blog post while washing the dishes.
We think EDUtalk ‘lowers the bar’ to publishing a variety of audio online and we hope that others experiment with these ways of gathering voices. By publishing you audio on EDUtalk you gain distribution, an audience and due to the CC license you can easily republish elsewhere if you like. We also hope that collecting a mix of different voices for all areas of education will make compelling listening.
What to EDUtalk?
Typical EDUtalk episodes are short, 1 – 8 minutes long and cover a wide range of topics. The focus for EDUtalk365 is curriculum change. So far contributions have included:
- Contributors own thoughts and experiences
- Workshops and Keynotes at conferences
- A conversation with or between colleagues
- An interview with someone with an interesting insight into, or experience of, curriculum change
- Discussions with students
- Audio resources which can be used by students or other professionals.
David has produced some prompts which you may find useful when planning the content of the audio that you are contributing:
- How are you/they engaging with the changing curriculum? How are you/they changing the opportunities which you/they provide for your/their learners?
- What differences have you/they noticed so far? How are learners responding? What challenges do you/they envisage?
- Which resources are effective for you/them and may be of interest to others?
- What are your/their reflections on curriculum change so far?
- Who or what has inspired you/them lately?
EDUtalk at TeachMeet BETT
Although I will not be at BETT David will. As well as recording his own and other peoples’ thoughts, he will be attending TeachMeet BETT and hopes to get permission from the presenters to record their audio and publish it over the next few days at EDUtalk.
We hope that EDUtalk will prove a useful resource for sharing idea and information from BETT and that you will contribute to it.
Looking Back
Dec 27th
The sun will soon be rising on 2010 and I just wanted to look back at a hugely eventful year for me personally. Here are some of the things that have been memorable.
Last Christmas we spent our holidays in Australia. It was an amazing trip for me and I would dearly love to return to that part of the world, perhaps on a more permanent basis. When we arrived in Sydney our apartment was not going to be open until later in the day. We had landed about 8am and the prospects of entertaining a 2 year old with all of our luggage still in tow was going to be tricky. But to our rescue came Judy O’Connell and Dean Groom, both of whom I had known from our various online networks but had never met before. Judy kindly picked us up from the airport and we went back to her house where we were able to unwind for a little bit. Dean picked us up later and took us on to our apartment in Manly. I am so grateful for that amazing gesture of kindness – it got our trip off to a great start and illustrates the trust that can be developed through online connections.
The TeachMeet community has had an incredible 2009 and I have been fortunate enough to have been to five events in person. The BETT show TeachMeet began the year and I was just amazed by the scale of things and the huge interest from the commercial sector. In May Stuart Sutherland and I organised and ran the first TeachMeet in the Midlands, hosted by the National College for School Leadership. It was incredible to be part of the full organisation and we are hoping to hold another in 2010. I was delighted to be invited to do a mini-note at TeachMeet North East London and also to organise TeachMeet Channel 4 to bookend their education conference. In September I was able to return to the Scottish Learning Festival and another TeachMeet held in the BBC Scotland building. Along with popping into various Flashmeetings I also attended Dai Barnes and Doug Belshaw’s hugely successful EdTechRoundup TeachMeet which was held online. This added another amazing dimension to this incredible professional development event. With Stuart Ridout, I am currently organising TeachMeet Bett 2010 as well as TeachMeet Takeover – it looks like it should kick off another inspiring year of grass roots professional development.
When you get an invitation from royalty to a conference in another country you can be excused for being a little sceptical. But the inaugural World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) in Qatar was no joke. I was delighted to be included in only 1000 of the invited delegates from all over the world. A handful of edubloggers were invited but not many actually attended. It was a privilege to represent primary school teachers from the UK and be part of the wider discussions. Although the word “innovation” was in the conference name, little was done to “walk the walk” in terms of the communication processes used. That said, I blogged and tweeted my way through the event to encourage remarks and comment from a wider audience. I hope that if there is a 2010 event that more will be done to encourage delegates to share what they experience with a world audience.
This time next year I will have spent a term in a new job! After a bit of grumbling I stumbled upon a Deputy Head Teacher job that I believed would be a great opportunity. I spent the return flight from Qatar writing the letter, which got me an interview. The day and a half interview was a great challenge and I was thrilled to be offered the job. I will be starting as Deputy Head Teacher in the Summer term. I have been in my current post for about 8 years and I have been through some great times, but it has long been time for me to move on and face a new challenge. As part of the interview I asked readers of this blog and followers on Twitter to help with some testimonials. I printed them off and found a moment in the formal interview to hand them out to the panel – it was an amazing set of references and I have no doubt helped secure the job. Thankyou to everyone who contributed to the 20,000 character job reference.
During 2009 I continued my involvement with multi-touch technology in the classroom. At BETT in January I met with representatives from SMART and organised an early trial of the SMART Table in my classroom. After working with it I felt it’s capacity to impact on learning was limited. Sadly the trial was abruptly ended, in my opinion due to an honest and frank account of my experiences I blogged about. Although critical of the SMART Table I was committed to helping SMART improve and develop it as it would directly benefit the wider multi-touch educational technology field. But, alas, they prevented that by taking it away and they did it, in my opinion, to limit the damage caused by my negative posts. I am now a member of the SynergyNet steering group at Durham University who are developing a multi-touch learning project, and met in November of this year for the first time. The developments at Durham are really exciting: multi-touch classrooms, networked tables able to pass media between them and a general focus on the pedagogies that underpin multi-touch enhanced learning.
This academic year we have been doing shorter half-termly topics in Year 5. We have found that although shorter, they are more focused. The first one was Sealife. Built around and inspired by the Nintendo Wii game Endless Ocean. It was a pleasure to work with the children during the 7 weeks as we explored, discovered and learned together. Using an open ended game to drive a topic was amazing to work with and the children were completely engaged and enjoyed every moment.
Maths Maps has been a long time in the making. Years ago I made some Google Earth resources that used the satellite imagery to structure maths activities. With the development of Google Maps and the ability to now collaborate on a map as if it is a document, such as a Google Document, I have been able to realise what I had always imagined with these resources. Each Maths Map is a maths topic with activities located on real life objects visible in the satellite imagery layer of Google Maps. In total the 3 current maps have been viewed 85,000 times, but more importantly the idea has inspired other teachers to begin using Google Maps to produce engaging content for their learners.
This year I finally made the switch to a self hosted blog. With the nudging of Doug Belshaw I bought some space and installed Wordpress, transferred everything from my old blog and have been really happy here in my new home. The most obvious advantage is the personalisation that you can achieve with your own space. There is no limit or other person choosing what you can add or not. You are free to be as creative with your space as you are with what you write. I was pleased to have been nominated by my peers for 6 different Edublog Awards categories this year, thankyou to all those who wrote such kind words in their nomination posts.
I just tweeted about a couple of updates to two different “Interesting Ways” presentations. The IWB resource was started in November 2007 and now there are about 30 different crowd-sourced resources with a huge amount of shared expertise. I prefer not to be too tool-centric, nor do I like the formulaic “100 Awesome things to do with a Cabbage” sort of posts that have littered education blogging recently. In my opinion what sets the Interesting Ways resources apart is that (a) they all begin at zero, they are put out there not as a perfectly formed multiple of 10 lists and (b) they are built by everyone, the crowd, educators explaining and sharing their experiences. They are authored by the community and I feel lucky to be in the position to keep encouraging them along.
A memorable year in lots of different ways and Christmas at home this year has been made really special as my 3 year old son’s excitement has built to a feverish crescendo. I have been able to share in some of that too. I wonder what 2010 will bring? I am looking forward to it already. I wish you all the best for 2010 and hope you continue to join me.
